Always someone looking to take advantage.

[temporus]

Has anyone else noticed a strong uptick in the number of Nigerian Scam messages they get? Yeah, I know most people probably don't go through their spam filters to see what's getting weeded out, but I do regularly to make sure I'm not missing legitimate messages. On rare occasion I do catch a message that should be coming through and is erroneously flagged. And, yeah, most people can tell a spam message just by the sender address combined with the subject. In any case, I've noticed a lot more of these scams recently. You know exactly the type I'm talking about: the ones that promise you can keep just 10% of this supposed 20 Million dollars, if you'll just help me complete this shady deal. When the Iraq war started, I'd see a ton of them claiming to be US Military personell trying to get ill gotten treasure they found out of the country and into US banks. I find the idea might make a good movie (See Three Kings) but just doesn't seem likely in reality. Recently the number of unbelievably wealthy people who tragically died leaving no next of kin in dangerous circumstances, requiring some lawyer to get you to cooperate and pretend to be next of kin is all the rage among these scammers.

I suspect that there is a correlation between the uptick in scams and the downswing in the economy. As people get more desperate, I suspect that they are more likely to become victims to these scams. And I suspect as well, that as more people fall victim, it just makes the scammers try harder. Call it a hidden consequence of a bad economy. Of course, there might be something that one could say about the scammers who got our economy as a whole into this mess to begin with. But I'm pretty sure for most people, that something would include a large amount of vulgarity, and I'm not inclined to go that direction today. I was, however, surprised recently to come across one of these Nigerian Scams that looked scarily more legit than most. This was yet another scam, purporting to be from some lawyer who wanted to present me as the next of kin of some person who died a few years ago. However, unlike most such scams, this one was for a person who actually shared my last name. That's new, because it means one of two things, either the scammer was targeting me in particular (IE, figuring out who I was by name and having it linked to my email address, a particular email address that isn't specifically listed with my name) or my last name (not a particularly common one) just so happened to be picked at random by the scammer. Strange.

I've know people who've been approached with similar scams through ads they've placed to sell things too. Like cars on Ebay, etc. Thankfully, all those I'm aware of managed to avoid trouble, but there is an industry out there, looking to sucker us all in and out of our hard earned cash. In these coming financial hard times, I hope everyone manages to skate through without too much difficulty. And I hope that these scammers get weeded out by your junkmail filters, before they ever reach your inbox.